Should I try student blogs in my reading/writing class?

I'm writing as I think here, so this might be messy to read...

For the past three years, I have organized my classes on a Moodle site, and used Blackboard before that. Today, as I finalize my syllabus, I'm pondering the possibility of using student blogs for some of the components such as posting reactions to the readings and essay outlines and drafts.

On Moodle, I can post and update key documents such as the syllabus and handouts as links to Google Documents very easily, and students can post their ideas/questions on the readings and their drafts and peer reviews of essays on Forums. I use wikis for tutorial sign up and for student collaboration on summarizing the main points of readings. Doing interactive quizzes is easy too. Everything is so easy for me to organize on Moodle.

The drawbacks of Moodle are that it is controlled by the university IT admin, and we have to request the creation of new courses through them each term. That is a pain and I would prefer to avoid that. Also, another weakness of Moodle seems to be that after the class is over, all of the work the students do is locked up in Moodle and not part of the student's own learning portfolio. Ideally, the essays and reading reactions the students did, and the comments they got from classmates and teacher would be owned by the student on their own blog. By using a blog for multiple courses, the blog can become a developed e-portfolio showcasing the student's work and reflections on it.

So...for this term, I wonder if I can ask students to:
1) Use Moodle for most things--resources, tutorial sign up
2) Set up and use their own blog for posting reactions and essays. For example, if they create an outline for an essay, they would post it on their blog, and I would leave a comment with my recommendations for improving it. They would also do a self-evaluation of their outline to find points to discuss with me in a tutorial. They would do something similar for a essay draft and final submitted essay(?). Of course, I want to require a paper submission also because I, personally, don't want to read all essays online. I want to go to a cafe or the library and chew through them off-line. But they would still post their essays online for their classmates to give feedback on prior to submission. Create in MS Word or Google Docs -> Post -> Self-Evaluate -> Get Peer Comments (pairs or group of three) - > Revise -> Print & Submit - > Get Teacher feedback and assessment. Yes, it could work on blogs, just like in Moodle as long as I can aggregate the feeds of all of student blogs into one blog for the class. I don't really have experience with that yet...would it work? in the worst case, I just make a list of blog addresses and put it on Moodle.

Write, like a journal, on their blog, their reactions to the readings and discussions they do...Will this work for facilitating comprehension and exchange of ideas regarding the readings we are going to do? In my first two years, I used paper Reading Reaction Journals, read, take notes, write reactions, bring notebook to class, submit two times during the term for a diligence check. Very simple, very personal...but students cannot collaborate very well by reading each other's ideas with that system except on a very limited basis in class discussions. Also, I found that I disliked collecting piles of heavy notebooks and evaluating them. But most importantly, I found that students would not prepare for class discussions consistently because they were not held accountable for having done the reading and prepared ideas about it.

So, I switched to one page worksheets. After reading and annotating, students had to write a list of main ideas in the text, write a few critical reactions to points they felt needed more evidence or clarification, and created a few discussion questions to ask their classmates. They had to submit those in each class to show evidence of preparation, and a fairly large portion of their grade was based on that class-to-class homework. It takes a lot of paper management, but I firmly believe that in a language skills class, even if the approach is content-based, the short-term cycle of read/write/discuss is the most important way to ensure development, especially in speaking about difficult topics. If you don't prepare, it is really difficult to come up with ideas to say in class.

However, this term, I might allow one half of the class to make submission optional--in other words, only one half or one-third will be responsible for preparing notes for discussion for that day....or, I might cut up the reading so that one group is in charge of one part and another group is in charge of another.

So, can the worksheet method be changed to a blog based system? It does not make sense to require paper submission and also a blog submission on top of it. It is too much. But if one or two students are responsible for posting something for all classmates on a wiki or class blog, that might be good. Hmmm....Moodle still seems fine for this.

So, only the essay draft portfolio or some type of personal journal really has much meaning to put in a blog...so I may just try that. Or, I could introduce a Google Doc system...which can be convenient for peer/teacher review of drafts...Hmmm.

I'll wait until I assign the essay later this term.